Throat-clearing
The Minnesota State Fair looms large in our state, even in the urban center. We call it the Great Minnesota Get-Together, and I love it unreasonably. For the last few years, I've been entering in the garment-making competition, as described in this PDF. I'm very proud that I have gotten a few red ribbons (second place), but I long for a blue (first place).
There's some strategy in this. What you do is look at the previous year's winners and determine what category is far too full for you to compete in. For example, there are 19 entries in Women's Blouse. If 19 people think they make a blouse good enough for the Fair, then there are probably people doing it who are better than I am. (This goes so much more for knitting and quilting. If 42 people think they make a competition-worthy cabled sweater, well...). This dictates what you're going to make for the year. Of course, many people make the same calculation, so it's still a guess.
This year I decided that my categories would be
424: Historic reproduction clothing, documentation of historic pattern must be included
417: Blazer, lined or unlined
And that's all the description you get. You just better hope that your understanding of "historic" matches the judge's.
State Fair Trousers
I've made this pattern before, albeit 10 years ago. It's got some good provenance, and I think it will count. I did use fusible interfacing, but otherwise there's nothing I'm doing that couldn't have been done by sewing machines of the era. I have this really excellent multi-color houndstooth wool that I made a cape from, but what do you wear a wool cape with? The obvious answer is old-timey trousers.
I set up my trusty projector and cut out all the (many) pieces.
The thing about State Fair sewing is that I am, by nature, a bodger. Close enough is good enough for things I'm making for myself. However, the consistent feedback I get from the state fair judges is that my vision is good, but my execution is imperfect - my finishing details are especially likely to be sloppy. So every year, I set myself to sew something without succumbing to my besetting sin - laziness.
If something doesn't match, I go back and adjust it until it does, instead of easing it. In order to make these trousers look good, I needed to hand-baste all the seams so that the horizontal lines match up. Here, let me show you the difference.
I did hand-baste these to match, but had a total brain-fart, and matched them at a 1/4th inch in from the fabric edge, instead of 5/8ths, which is the actual seam allowance on this pattern. Since the fabric is not square pieces, that mattered. So then I had to rip all the seams out and re-hand-baste and re-sew.
And it's been the same every time I attach one piece of this garment to another. Tweaking and hand-basting and ripping to get it Right, instead of Good Enough. Because that's what I'm being judged on.
I finished my night with the crotch seam, and I basted on the red lines, because that's what's easiest for me to see. But I am genuinely unsure if it's correctly aligned - the red lines do line up, but I would expect the other colors to form a chevron. Unless I'm misunderstanding how "even" the plaid is. Anyway, this is either spot-on or half-a check off, which is like half an inch, and I need to rip out that seam. What do you think?
More on my State Fair adventures as I keep working. I'm still figuring out Leaflet, so the posting style may not be consistent, but it's good to have a place to store this.
State Fair Trousers, Update 2
I went back and ripped out and re-basted all the sketchily pattern-matched parts. It's better, and it was worth doing. UGH, this is why I do this project, but also it's so difficult for me to care that much.
The effect is actually more obvious if you zoom out this picture.
While I was at it, I also fixed a couple places on the side seams that were less than precise.
I'm now ready to start attaching the waistband. You'd think this would mean that we are close to done, but you would be wrong, my friend. These pants have an interior lining system called the curtain. And also a crotch guard. These parts are made of cotton or linen and are attached so that it's relatively easy to take them out, launder them, and whipstitch them back in. Everybody sweats (except ladies, of course). However, laundry in this era mostly consisted of soap-soap (not detergent, frequently lye-based), boiling or near-boiling water, and aggressive scrubbing. That kind of treatment will felt almost any kind of wool. Which is what most anglo-culture outerwear was made of. So! Better to have things that are easy to launder next to your skin. This is also, by the way, why men's shirts were so long. The shirt-tails served as kind of the OG boxer shorts.
Anyway, since I'm making the historical pattern, I need to make the historical lining. On the bright side, I don't have to make any belt-loops, which are honestly kind of fussy. Nobody wore belts to hold their pants up in the Victorian era. Belt loops appeared on US Army uniforms in 1904, and on Levi-Strauss jeans in 1922. Men wore suspenders/braces to hold their pants up, and it was a kinder age for stout gentlemen. They could get quite fancy and embroidered, because let's be real, Victorians would embroider anything that stood still and some things that wouldn't.
I'm still deciding if I'm going to make suspenders to go with these trousers. That is, would the suspenders be an integral part of the trousers, or separate? It would be easier to display them with suspenders, maybe, although it's going to be a pain for them to find a dummy to put these on anyway, because 26-inch waist is very smol.
In news from the next project, though, I found a drycleaner to block-fuse the interfacing to the fabric for my blazers, thus saving me HOURS of work. Yay!